Announcing OpenADR 3 VEN for Home Assistant

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I’m excited to release OpenADR 3 VEN, a new Home Assistant integration that brings real-time energy pricing and greenhouse gas emissions data directly into your smart home.

What It Does

The integration connects your Home Assistant instance to an OpenADR 3 Virtual Top Node (VTN) and acts as a Virtual End Node (VEN). It discovers available programs — electricity pricing schedules, marginal emissions rates — and creates sensor entities that update automatically throughout the day.

With these sensors in Home Assistant, you can:

  • Automate based on electricity price — run your dishwasher, charge your EV, or pre-cool your home when rates are lowest
  • Optimize for carbon — shift flexible loads to hours when the grid is cleanest
  • Visualize pricing and emissions — display hourly schedules on your dashboards
  • Build smarter energy routines — combine price/GHG signals with other automations you already use

Key Features

  • Hourly pricing sensors — current electricity price in $/kWh with the full 24-hour schedule available as attributes
  • GHG emissions sensors — marginal operating emissions rate in g CO₂/kWh
  • MQTT push updates — when the VTN supports MQTT, sensors update in near-real-time rather than waiting for the next poll
  • Multi-program support — subscribe to any combination of programs from the VTN
  • Daily statistics — min, max, and average values as sensor attributes
  • Easy setup — configure entirely through the Home Assistant UI: enter a VTN URL, select your programs, done

For California Residents

If you’re a PG&E or SCE customer, you can connect to the Grid Coordination Energy Price Server — a free, no-authentication VTN that provides:

  • 492 pricing programs covering PG&E and SCE service territories, broken down by circuit and substation
  • 11 GHG emissions programs (MOER data) for California grid regions
  • Day-ahead pricing from the CAISO Day-Ahead Market via GridX
  • Marginal emissions from SGIP Signal

Just point the integration at https://price.grid-coordination.energy/openadr3/3.1.0 and select the programs relevant to your location.

See the Price Server User Guide for full details.

Installation

The integration is available now via HACS as a custom repository:

  1. In HACS, go to Integrations → three-dot menu → Custom repositories
  2. Add https://github.com/grid-coordination/openadr3-ven-hass as an Integration
  3. Install OpenADR 3 VEN and restart Home Assistant
  4. Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration and search for OpenADR 3 VEN

We’ve also submitted the integration for inclusion in the HACS default repository, so it will eventually be searchable directly from HACS without the custom repository step.

What’s Next

  • 72-hour forecast support — the price server already provides multi-day forecast data; we’ll be adding sensors and attributes to surface it (#1)
  • Authentication support — connecting to VTNs that require OAuth2 or token-based auth
  • Additional VTN compatibility — testing with other OpenADR 3 implementations

Get Involved

We’d love to hear how you use real-time energy data in your automations.

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