This lesson is long, because it ties together many threads: inverter data, whole-home meter data, the Energy Dashboard, self-consumption, battery storage, net metering and export credits, dynamic pricing, and integrations. You don't need to deploy all of it right away. Understanding the flows and knowing where to get data for a decision matters more.

Plan on about 75 to 90 minutes. When it comes to dynamic pricing and net metering, rules can change over time and vary a great deal by country, region, and utility. In this course I explain the underlying concepts and show you how to use them in Home Assistant, but always check current information with your grid operator, your electricity supplier, and your own solar interconnection agreement.

Four figures you need to tell apart

With solar in Home Assistant, you'll most often encounter four kinds of data. Each answers a different question. If you mix them up, the Energy Dashboard and your conclusions will be wrong, even when the individual numbers look reasonable.

Lesson 5 introduced a simple balance formula. When you have PV production, import, and export from the same period, you can estimate home consumption:

PV power and PV energy: today and total

An inverter usually gives you two kinds of PV data. Power in W tells you how much you're producing right now. Energy in kWh tells you how much you've produced in total, or over a given period. It's the same pattern you learned in Lesson 3: power is a moment, energy is the result after time.

Self-consumption: energy used on-site

Self-consumption is the PV energy you used right away at home instead of sending it to the grid. Under most net metering or export-credit arrangements, this is usually the most valuable part of your production, because you avoid buying energy from the grid at the full retail rate. The higher your self-consumption, the better you're using your own production.

When you have PV production and export from the same period, you can estimate self-consumption like this:

The self-consumption percentage shows what share of your own production you use on-site. If you produce 30 kWh on a sunny day and export 20 kWh, self-consumption is 10 kWh, or about 33%. The rest went to the grid. In Lessons 7 and 8 we'll use this for decisions about devices and dashboards.

The Energy Dashboard with solar

In Lesson 2 you configured the Energy Dashboard. With solar, you add three main sources: production under Solar panels, import and export under Electric grid. Each has to be an energy entity in kWh, cumulative, with the correct attributes from Lesson 2.

The Energy Dashboard won't show self-consumption as its own category. You have to calculate it yourself, or build your own template sensor. That's normal. The system dashboard gives you production, import, and export. The rest is your own analysis.

Template sensors: home consumption and self-consumption

Below is an example of template sensors built on the daily counters from utility_meter in Lesson 3. I'm assuming you already have: daily PV production, daily import, and daily export. Swap in your own names.

Daily home consumption and self-consumption

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "Home Consumption Daily"
        unique_id: home_consumption_daily
        unit_of_measurement: "kWh"
        device_class: energy
        availability: >
          {{ states('sensor.pv_production_daily') not in ['unknown', 'unavailable', 'none']
             and states('sensor.grid_import_daily') not in ['unknown', 'unavailable', 'none']
             and states('sensor.grid_export_daily') not in ['unknown', 'unavailable', 'none'] }}
        state: >
          {% set pv = states('sensor.pv_production_daily') | float %}
          {% set imp = states('sensor.grid_import_daily') | float %}
          {% set exp = states('sensor.grid_export_daily') | float %}
          {{ (pv + imp - exp) | round(2) }}

      - name: "Self-Consumption Daily (No Battery)"
        unique_id: self_consumption_daily_no_battery
        unit_of_measurement: "kWh"
        device_class: energy
        availability: >
          {{ states('sensor.pv_production_daily') not in ['unknown', 'unavailable', 'none']
             and states('sensor.grid_export_daily') not in ['unknown', 'unavailable', 'none'] }}
        state: >
          {% set pv = states('sensor.pv_production_daily') | float %}
          {% set exp = states('sensor.grid_export_daily') | float %}
          {{ (pv - exp) | round(2) }}

For a self-consumption percentage, you can add another sensor. Remember that dividing by zero needs some care. Below is a simple guarded version.

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "Self-Consumption Percent Today"
        unique_id: self_consumption_percent_today
        unit_of_measurement: "%"
        state: >
          {% set pv = states('sensor.pv_production_daily') | float %}
          {% set auto = states('sensor.self_consumption_daily_no_battery') | float %}
          {{ ((auto / pv) * 100) | round(1) if pv > 0 else 0 }}

Self-consumption versus self-sufficiency

Self-consumption and self-sufficiency aren't the same thing. Self-consumption tells you what percentage of your PV production you used on-site. Self-sufficiency tells you what percentage of the home's consumption was covered by your own solar. You can have high self-consumption with a small system, but still draw a lot from the grid. You can also have large production but low self-consumption if you export most of the energy.

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: "Self-Sufficiency Percent Today"
        unique_id: self_sufficiency_percent_today
        unit_of_measurement: "%"
        state: >
          {% set consumption = states('sensor.home_consumption_daily') | float %}
          {% set auto = states('sensor.self_consumption_daily_no_battery') | float %}
          {{ ((auto / consumption) * 100) | round(1) if consumption > 0 else 0 }}

Battery storage and state of charge

If you have battery storage, charging, discharging, and state of charge (SOC) join the picture. In the Energy Dashboard, storage gets configured under its own category. Your inverter or battery controller usually gives you charging power, discharging power, and an SOC percentage entity.

Net metering and export credits in plain terms

How exported solar energy gets valued varies a lot depending on where you live and who your utility is. In some places you'll get a kWh-for-kWh net metering credit. In others, exported energy earns a separate export rate, sometimes called a feed-in tariff or an export credit, that may be lower than the retail price you pay for imported energy, and may itself vary with wholesale market prices at the time of export. The exact rules, credit rates, and any expiration on unused credits depend on your specific utility, your interconnection agreement, and local regulation. Home Assistant can help you understand the direction and scale of these flows, but it doesn't replace your utility's own billing.

Net metering and export-credit rules, rates, and any expiration terms can change. Don't base major financial decisions solely on a simplified model in Home Assistant. Check your interconnection agreement, your utility's communications, and current regulatory information for your area.

Dynamic and wholesale pricing: the value of energy over time

In a growing number of markets, electricity has a price that changes hour by hour, or even every fifteen or thirty minutes, based on wholesale conditions. In the UK, this is familiar from tariffs like Octopus Energy's Agile plan. In parts of the US, some utilities offer real-time or day-ahead pricing plans tied to wholesale market prices. The exact mechanism, the settlement period, and how it interacts with solar export credits depend heavily on your specific utility and rate plan, so don't treat this lesson as financial or legal advice.

Grid operators and market operators typically publish wholesale price data through an official reporting service, and the exact publication format can change over time. That means any Home Assistant integration pulling this kind of price data should be actively maintained and matched to the current official data source for your market.

Inverter integrations: where to get PV data

The inverter is your main source of PV production data. How you connect to it depends on the brand and model. In Home Assistant you'll encounter a few paths.

In practice you'll come across integrations for brands like FoxESS, Huawei, Fronius, Solis, Sofar, GoodWe, Growatt, or inverters supported through Solarman. Don't pick an integration just by brand name from a forum post. Check the exact inverter model, the dongle version, the communication method, and whether the data is local or cloud-based.

A dynamic pricing integration in Home Assistant

Community dynamic-pricing integrations from HACS pull prices from official sources and build sensors with the current price, the price a few hours out, and sometimes the cheapest and most expensive windows of the day. With that, you can show the price on a dashboard, or use it in an automation from Lesson 7.

A simple sensor: is it cheap right now

template:
  - binary_sensor:
      - name: "Energy Price Cheap Now"
        unique_id: energy_price_cheap_now
        icon: mdi:cash-minus
        state: >
          {{ states('sensor.energy_price_now_per_mwh') | float(9999) < 60 }}

What to show on a dashboard to start

We'll build a full energy dashboard with a power flow card and ApexCharts in Lesson 8. At this stage, a simple set of cards that answers the most important questions each day is enough.

Common mistakes

Assignment: your first picture of solar in Home Assistant

Key takeaways

What's next

In Lesson 7 we'll move from data to decisions: standby, rate plans, PV surplus, dynamic pricing, and careful automations built around actual payback. We'll use what you built today: production, import, export, self-consumption, and the price of energy over time.

If you finish this lesson seeing not just how much you produce, but also how much you use on-site and how much you send back, you have a genuine picture of solar in Home Assistant. That's the foundation for savings that actually make sense.