Is getting usage information for gas and electric as easy as this document says all you need is to enter your credentials and the information will be pulled? It doesn’t mention it in the document, but is there a zigbee device required?
This integration pulls the data from the cloud. No device needed beyond your HA install.
‘ZigBee’ device to talk to your meter direct, or the Opower integration that talks to your energy provider over the internet, and gives you retrospective data they have already collected with a prediction on future consumption by using historic data and trends to guess it?
[Actually it is not just garden variety ZigBee, but a similar IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, carefully locked up by access codes to prevent tampering. It varies, and most meter manufacturers offer different connection options for each utility provider to choose from]
A lot of European utilities actually open up their smart meters for read only access, via a standardised optical port that speaks a known protocol, but PG&E aren’t there yet, requiring billions to upgrade their still working billing system. If it ain’t broke applies…
Example: I use a light pulse detector as my electrical smart meter gives 1000 pulses per kWh from the onboard LED, and I find it correlates pretty closely with my meter (except when I am fiddling with firmware updates and it skips a few flashes) My utility can give me consumption data from their billing system, in fifteen minute slots, with a time lag, if I want to screen scrape it. A little awkward if I want to make real time decisions based on power demand and supply for things like EV charging and solar battery control, where the inverter integration contributes real time data to HomeAssistant.
Your use case may be different to mine. If you just want data with a lag, use Opower to suck it from your utility provider. If you need live data, get more intimate with your meters, or add sensors to meter it independently.
There are 2 ways to get energy data from PG&E. You can do either or both:
- Opower integration. This does not require any hardware — you basically just provide your PG&E credentials and the integration will pull the data from PG&E’s cloud. The benefits are that this provides energy AND power AND spend. The huge drawback is that the data seems to be delayed by about 2 days, so it’s useless for any (near-)realtime monitoring and shows up as missing on Home Assistant dashboards.
- You can use a hardware device (like a Rainforest Eagle 3) to connect locally to your smart meter (and then via wifi to your Home Assistant instance). This likely requires at least one phonecall to PG&E to get working. This is pretty cool once working and it gives you quite time-granular near-realtime power AND energy.
Can you expand on how that is done? Thank you!
Sure. Basically I bought a Rainforest Eagle 3 and then followed their instructions.
This basically boils down to:
- Plug in the box somewhere close to your meter. (It requires power and either wired ethernet or wifi.)
- If you are using WiFi you have to do a few extra steps to get the device connected to your home wifi. (This is pretty similar to the steps for most wifi smart devices like smart plugs.) If you’re using wired ethernet then you just plug it in.
- Then you log into your PG&E account and go to “Stream my data”. It will first check eligibility. (It told me I wasn’t eligible, but there’s a PG&E phone number to call too, and they were able to get me connected nonetheless.) Then you enter (or tell them over the phone) a few identifier strings from your device and PG&E creates the pairing, so data flows locally from the meter to the Rainforest box, and from there it can go onwards to the Rainforest server and/or your HomeAssistant.
- Your device will then be discovered by Home Assistant and you can add it using the “Rainforest” integration. (You can also set up an account on the Rainforest Automation website to see your data there.) This creates an Home Assistant device with entities for power, total energy delivered, and total energy received (presumably from return-to-grid if you have solar?).
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Opower isn’t accurate anyway. Thanks for the tip.
TTBOMK the opower integration uses the same data that is used for billing so hopefully it is accurate enough 
…
“Rainforest Eagle 3” assumes your meter is smart and HAN compatible. Not all meters are. Further reading specific for you (three web links):
https://www.rainforestautomation.com/state-california-residents/pacific-gas-electric
The third way is to add power monitoring independant of the PG&E meter altogether. Things like CT (current transformers) to measure AC current where it enters the premises.
Getting the same data direct from the smart meter that the utility uses for billing in real time isn’t the cheapest option, but for some, the most elegant way to monitor in real time, and control devices in real time.
Yep.
(Note that I said “there are 2 ways to get energy data from PG&E”.) There are lots of other ways to get energy data from other sources, ranging from CT devices installed in your breaker panel, to a camera pointed at your meter, to aggregating readings from individual smart devices that report their consumption and/or smart plugs, to aggregating estimated (rather than measured) loads from individual devices based on their on/off status, to hybrids of the above…
Regarding HAN availability, my understanding is that by now most “normal” residential customers in PG&E territory should be eligible, but obviously there could be exceptions. There is a tool on PG&E’s website to check your individual availability based on your service address (log into your account and go to “stream my data”)… and even if the tool says that you are not eligible, it’s still worth a phone call to the special “stream my data” help line because it may still be possible anyway. (It was for me.)
Good luck!
@mike15 PG&E says they support this device. Is that the one you have?
Rainforest – EAGLE Energy Gateway
- Model: RFA-Z109
- Firmware Version: 2.1.1.6960
@Paddy707 I think mine is a “RFA-Z115” – it’s the one for sale here: https://rainforestautomation.com/us-retail-store/eagle-3-energy-gateway-and-smart-home-hub/ (which seems to be the only “Eagle” for sale from Rainforest Automation). It is definitely working for me with PG&E.
Ok. The model I pasted was from the PGE site. Both my Smart Meter accounts show up under streaming and when I called they said that they do the finishing touches when I call them.
The Eagle does not support natural gas according to Eagle. Bummer
Depending on the wireless options installed in your gas meter, and a firmware update from Eagle in the future, and it might.
I also have had no luck getting gas readings. (They do come from Opower but are several days delayed, so they don’t work in the Home Assistant energy dashboard.)
Separately, if you’re going down the Rainforest Eagle path, you may be interested in the MIDAS integration which can get you an entity that shows the current electricity price for your specific rate plan: GitHub - MattDahEpic/ha-midas: Home Assistant integration to get energy prices from California's MIDAS energy price API