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In the most recent installment of the Sustainability Podcast, ARC analyst Gaven Simon sat down with Eli Beckman, the mayor of Corte Madera, to discuss community resilience, Community Choice Aggregators, and the opportunity to achieve sustainable success within the Accessory Dwelling Unit space.
The town of Corte Madera is located just outside San Francisco and is composed of two parts: the hillside and the bayside. Both of these areas are affected by climate change impacts such as wildfires and floods. These dueling pressures drive Eli to work in sustainability. In his day job, Eli is an architect specializing in Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), a popular feature of many Californian properties. These units are no larger than 1,200 square feet and may resemble a “tiny house” or a guest house. Eli focuses on creating the least carbon-intensive ADUs on the market, with the goal of eventually producing carbon-negative units.
Distributed renewable energy will not become widely adopted until it is cost-competitive for the end user. Although this did not happen overnight for the town of Corte Madera, cost-competitive clean energy is now a reality for its residents. Eli Beckman, in addition to his other roles, sits on the board of his town's Community Choice Aggregator (CCA), a publicly owned utility with the sole purpose of providing clean, affordable energy to its customers. According to the EPA, “CCA programs allow local governments to procure power on behalf of their residents, businesses, and municipal accounts from an alternative supplier while still receiving transmission and distribution service from their existing utility provider.” Currently, 10 states have CCAs, and in 2022, about 5.7 million customers procured approximately 14.6 billion kWh of electricity through CCAs.
To close out the episode, Eli spoke about his participation in the Climate Mayors Group at Aspen Climate Ideas. The group held a summit at the conference in March, where mayors could learn from one another and hear about the range of climate solutions being deployed across the United States. Eli shared his experience meeting fellow mayors from across the country and how their stories inspired him to bring new innovative ideas back home.
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