Expose current total electricity price to Home Assistant

[L1512191]

I would like to suggest exposing the current total electricity price as an MQTT/Home Assistant sensor.

At the moment, when using the Home Assistant payload, POW-U exposes the current import price, for example:

[POW-U] Current import price
1.1643 NOK/kWh

However, this appears to be the fetched electricity/spot price and does not include the currently active price modifiers configured in POW-U.

In my case, I have configured:

• Enova: +0.0713 NOK/kWh
• Elavgift: +0.0100 NOK/kWh
• Energiledd day/night/weekend, depending on the current time
• MVA: 25%

The resulting actual price for one kWh at the current time is therefore different from the value exposed as Current import price.

Suggested new sensor

For example:

[POW-U] Current total import price

with a value representing:

Current electricity price
+ currently applicable price modifiers
+ applicable VAT
= current total import price

Why this would be useful

This would be particularly useful in Home Assistant.

Currently, if I want to automate an appliance based on the actual electricity cost, I would have to reproduce the entire POW-U price-modifier configuration inside Home Assistant:

• spot price
• Enova
• electricity tax
• day/night energy tariff
• weekend tariff
• VAT
• scheduling rules

That creates unnecessary duplication and makes it possible for HA and POW-U to produce different results if the configuration changes.

If POW-U already performs this calculation internally for its energy accounting, exposing the result would make it directly usable by Home Assistant automations.

For example:

if Current total import price < 1.20 NOK/kWh
    allow EV charging

or:

charge the EV during the cheapest periods based on the actual
price including all configured tariffs and VAT

EV charger use case

I am also planning to use this value to integrate POW-U with my Easee EV charger through Home Assistant.

The intention is to use the actual POW-U price calculation to write the electricity cost back to the Easee system, so that the Easee app can show the correct price/cost for each charging session, rather than showing a spot-price-only figure which is not the final price.

Having POW-U expose the already-calculated current total price would make this considerably simpler and, more importantly, ensure that the price used by Home Assistant and the price calculated by POW-U are based on the same tariff configuration.

The existing Current import price sensor could of course remain unchanged as the underlying/fetched electricity price.