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This is exactly right.

In “Der Atomstaat” (“The Nuclear State”) Jungk quotes the Austrian scientist Helga Novotny, who back in the day worked at the IIASA (International Institute für Applied Systems Analysis) in Vienna/Laxenburg. She said that “the opposition against nuclear energy roots in the resistance against those who profit from the increasing economical and scientific focus. The opposition is directed against large-scale industry that makes common cause with big states and big science. It is the resistance of those who feel powerless and small in the face of the developments” (Der Atomstaat, 1977, zit. n. Ausgabe 1979 p. 77ff). This finding is still relevant today and still undermines democracy.

https://jungk-bibliothek.org/robert_jungk_english_2/

This. Replacing the term "intermediary" with the term "institution" is an exercise worthwhile. For one will realize that institutions serve various important social functions that go far beyond middleman style profit and rent skimming.

Proponents of blockchain revolutions need to come to terms with existing institutions, working with them rather than against.

"dropping most of the backend application layer (currently filled by django/rails/etc) in favor of a Vue/React <=JSON=> private blockchain arch."

I second that.

Coins are unavoidable in currency-like applications such as Bitcoin. But it is perfectly viable to run a coinless network. Energy is one area where coin backed Proof of work mining isn't very useful

You have to conceptualise ethereum as a market communication bus to exchange business information between autonomously acting market partners. Nothing more nothing less.

Smart contracts encapsulate market logic, i. e. the stuff where market partners have a need to verify that the information (or value) shared was/is processed exactly as specified.

The key insight is to limit your utilisation of smart contracts to this type of application. You want to keep your smart contract super simple and focused on doing only one thing. Also note that marktet logic is almost always just a tiny fraction of the overall business logic of whatever you are building. So there will always be this other place where you develop the rest of your app with more traditional means (e. g. Javascript)

To integrate the blockchain powered market communication bit into your app, you simply wrap your deployed smart contracts into a software wallet such as ethters.js. This makes the solidity methods available in you application as simple js functions via dot notation for example.

Here is an implementation of this: https://github.com/energychain/StromDAO-BusinessObject

you can just `require` the business object in you app and have access to 30 or so smart contracts that fire into a PoA blockchain network called Fury. Its actually quite simple. Take a look at the tests in the github repository. You can even trigger smart contract factories to mint your own preconfigured contracts if need be.

Here is an other example. A subset of the same smart-contracts but implemented withing a command line tool:

https://github.com/energychain/BusinessObject-MeterPointOper...

What you end up with then is a rather traditional app that 'composes' smart contracts to read and write stuff into/out of a blockhain network where appropriate.

I am not sure how the LO3 system works in particular. But I have been involved in helping create a still experimental system that enables exactly the use case you described: make trading across the grid happen by allowing producers and consumers to agree on the amount and origins of the electricity in circulation at any given point in time.

https://drive.google.com/a/stromdao.com/file/d/0B0DEak0BnhBf...

https://github.com/energychain/StromDAO-BusinessObject