My name is Danielle DeBoer, I was born and raised in Salt Lake City, UT – however, I have lived briefly in both Youngstown, OH as well as Austin, TX.  My current line of work is in Human Resources and Accounting, as exciting as that all sounds I would really like to get out of it and pursue a career in environmental consulting.  I think living in the western United States, there is great potential for sustainable energy to become quite popular among corporations and residents, but it’s going to take discussing dollars and figures before people are willing to make the big switch considering so much of this side of the U.S. was founded on cheap coal energy.

I haven’t started my own business but at the moment I do assist my parents in running theirs.  They currently own about 10 rental properties within the state and we do all of the property maintenance, rental agreements and tenant screening ourselves.  No middleman.  Of course, once someone has signed the rental agreement, the business is very low-maintenance so it thankfully doesn’t take too much time out of my day to help them with this venture.  On a local level, I think a business that provided smart home integration would be quite successful out here.  What I mean by that is educating residents how to incorporate energy efficient upgrades in to their existing infrastructure, tying it all in to a home network where the owner can then monitor the efficiency of their appliances, water/sewer/trash output, and remotely manage all facets of these upgrades.  Our local utility company does offer to send an energy auditor out to give residents feedback on what changes can be made, however, I think it would also be neat to tie this in to remote monitoring and managing, similar to how security systems now let residents tap in to the cameras they have installed around their homes.

Because of the topography out here, geothermal, solar, and wind are all viable means of off-grid energy maintenance and having the ability to manage what is operating and when would provide the user a great sense of independence from the grid.  And with these technologies becoming more popular over the recent years, the cost for upgrading is reducing at a reasonable rate, which makes the ROI much more appealing.