Just because you cannot go to a miner's office doesn't mean that they aren't a middle man. The illusion of direct payments is simply untrue and you need to trust that there will never be more nodes from people that want to fraud the whole system than there are trustworthy ones. You trust complete strangers with your money that you can never meet and never complain about. Worse, you can't even sue them because they are most likely not in your jurisdiction and/or anonymous.
Do you also imagine there would be wires running between each set of properties? If not you still need a third party to manage the centralized distribution network in which case you're not going to sell directly to your neighbors you're going to sell to the grid.
One interesting idea is having certain energy tagged as "green" energy, like wind generated, which some people might be willing to pay more for.
How do you prevent fraud (bypassing the meter) and who still pays to maintain the grid? Not sure. Is this really more efficient than a private / gov run system? I don't know. Blockchain interacting with real physical assets always seems murky to me.
> Blockchains are "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically."
Blockchains are exactly what they're looking for, they solve the problem perfectly. By design, the blocks in a blockchain are a redundant, scalable, unhackable, cryptographically secure ledger transaction (in theory!).
From wikipedia again:
> All blockchains are distributed ledgers but not all distributed ledgers are blockchains.
Ethereum is a blockchain implementation that has programmable contracts. If you're designing a system like this, and need it to be out in the public and self-governing, it makes sense.
(Even then, proof-of-work mining naturally recentralises, as we see with Bitcoin. Ethereum claims to be planning to move to proof-of-stake, but there's no working implementation or date for this.)