An integration for Home Assistant for customers of Localvolts electricity retailer in Australia
The key sensor exposed, costsFlexUp, is the current cost of electricity FOR YOU per kWh until the end of the current 5 minute interval. It's essentially the marginal cost of electricity for you and includes loss factors and network fees associated with increasing your consumption by 1kW right now. Of course, this only lasts until the end of the 5 minute interval, during which you would only have pulled that extra 1kW for 5 minutes which is a total energy of 1/12 kWh = 0.083kWh
To use this integration in Home Assistant, it is necessary to join Localvolts as a customer https://localvolts.com/register/ and request an API key using this form https://localvolts.com/localvolts-api/
Use this information when editing /homeassistant/configuration.yaml to insert these lines below for your own values
localvolts:
api_key: "abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123ab"
partner_id: "12345"
nmi_id: "1234567890" #Ignore trailing checksum digit on Localvolts bill and dashboard
In Home Assistant, copy the files in this repository into your existing Home Assistant's custom_components folder.
If you already have HACS installed for Home Assistant you can try adding this as a custom repository
In HACS
- Click on the 3 dots in the top right corner.
- Select "Custom repositories"
- Add the URL to the repository. https://github.com/gurrier/localvolts
- Select the integration category.
- Click the "ADD" button.
Now you can browse for and install Localvolts in Home Assistant using HACS
You will need to restart Home Assistant to get the integration working. Look for a new sensor named "sensor.costsFlexUp" in Home Assistant to verify it worked.
Now you can create actions that orchestrate your smart appliances based on what electricity cost you will incur with Localvolts