ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4724-0322

Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

8-1-2026

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

College/School/Department

Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences

Program

Atmospheric Science

First Advisor

Jorge González-Cruz

Committee Members

Richard Perez

Abstract

Integration of renewable resources to meet the growing energy demand of dense urban regions is becoming a global priority under decarbonization mandates. This study contributes to these ongoing efforts by assessing the feasibility of using locally deployable urban renewable resources, namely offshore wind in the New York Bight region and rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems over New York City, to meet the electricity demand of the city, and the grid vulnerabilities that emerge, during two contrasting extreme-weather periods: the intense heatwave of June 2025 and a fully electrified winter cold snap in January 2018. A unified, meteorologically driven modelling framework, based on the urbanized Weather Research and Forecasting model, is deployed as a demand management tool to simulate the urban climate, the renewable generation and the energy demand variables within a single coupled architecture, hence resolving feedback effects between weather, the urban environment and the energy system. Findings reveal a persistent mismatch between the composite renewable generation and the load in both seasons; in the summer case the city falls short by approximately 1380 GWh over the month (approximately 30  % of the month’s load), with a persistent deficit of ~5.4 GW during the peak hours of the heatwave (approximately 60 % of the event’s observed peak load), while in the fully electrified winter case the heating load raises the demand considerably by approximately 8 times the current gas boilers baseline load and a multi-day offshore wind drop during the cold snap drives the deficit to nearly 9 GW, with the rooftop PV being almost entirely suppressed by snow cover. Three storage integration scenarios are analysed to mitigate these deficits, reducing the deficits by as little as ~7 % under the realistic statewide goal of storage deployment, which is one of the analysed scenarios. Other scenarios achieve better deficit reduction, however, their effectiveness is found to be strongly dependent on the seasonality of the available surpluses and the scale of the deployed capacities. This study provides a transferable modelling framework for evaluating renewable integration in dense urban environments that can be used by grid operators to support resilience during both extreme heat and extreme cold events, while clarifying the limits of the local resources and the need for firm low carbon generation in fully managing the city's load.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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