Integrating climate risk assessment into the Renewable-dominated Power System

Renewable-dominated Power System (RDPS) is emerging as critical trend to achieve CO2 emission reduction, and the COP28 climate summit has set a global goal to triple its capacity to at least 11,000 GW by 2030. However, this system is heavily reliant on weather and climate conditions. While the inclusion of the storage in the RDPS can alleviate the impact of the volatility and intermittency, the new source-grid-load-storage system creates more risks resulting from increasing complexity of interconnections. These include heightened variability in renewable energy generation under extreme weather, growing instability in transmission infrastructure due to climate-induced stress, performance degradation of storage systems under temperature extremes, and limited flexibility in demand response during climate-driven load surges. Critically, these risks are not isolated but often interdependent, as climate-triggered disruptions in one part of the system can cascade across interconnected components and amplify local failures into large-scale outages. In this perspective, we assess the risks for the system across source, grid, load, and storage from the dimensions of hazard, exposure and vulnerability, highlight the emerging cascading risks driven by climate variability and extremes, and call for an urgent expansion of climate risk assessment frameworks to ensure the resilience and reliability of future power systems.