Speaking to the audience while responding to Brientim’s comments: These devices can measure only what the electricity meter attached to your home can report. Here in Victoria, your solar is connected to your home’s wiring on the home side of the meter, so the meter doesn’t even know that you’ve got solar, and happily reports the net usage, which might be negative.
If you need to know how much power your solar panels are pushing out, you really have to ask the inverter. For which no plugins exist, yet.
Edit: in my supplier area (United Energy), the meter isn’t reporting cost per kWh to the RAVEn. If they are going to start spot pricing it will likely involve reprogramming all the meters to start providing cost to the RAVEn, which already has an API call for that (get_current_price).
@futzle, I probably did not explain myself very well. I was the actually after “to grid” and the meter does capture “feed in” or “to grid”. I do not every get negative net usage and maybe because we use more but the split reporting “from grid” and “to grid” will provide an accurate reporting mechanism. I was not actual solar production which as you state “If you need to know how much power your solar panels are pushing out, you really have to ask the inverter” and every inverter introduces their own protocols and API. I have this and just need to set it up again but work and other things have taken too, too much time. I believe this will be the incentive for my family to switch thing off and not how much it is costing… a bit of reverse physiology here.
I was previously liaising with the good people here at fastnetwork.com.au and was going to be part of a trail here for Powercor but due to delays in moving, I have not heard anymore recently.
The implementation they are implying will go further and requires smart switches and embedded remote device control for various product similar to California and yes, spot pricing was mentioned as well.
Correct in regard to a single Inverter but if you are talking “Inverters” then that’s not correct 