Home assistant – energy – price entity that switches between night and day tariff (peak and off-peak hours)

I have a raspberry with Home Assistant Tracking energy usage using the Aeotec Home Energy METER Gen5 (ZWave) and a WiFi Shelly 3EM (2 separate locations).
I was in need to track the consumed energy in €, home assistant allows you to pick a “Use an entity with current price” in the energy dashboard

I did not want to deal with automation and such, so I devised a simple template sensor that switches its “price” between specific time periods. (pro tip: convert the current hour of the day to minutes + add the current minutes)

here we see the sensor switching price

The new modern way of doing this would be with a template sensor

Based on EDF’s peak and off-peak hours

template:
    - sensor:
        - name: "EDF Price"
          unique_id: edf_price
          unit_of_measurement: EUR/kWh
          state:  "
            {% set time = now().hour * 60 + now().minute %}
            {% if time > 750 and time < 870 or time > 90 and time < 450 %}
            {{'14.70'|float/100}}
            {% else %}
            {{'18.41'|float/100}}
            {% endif %}
            " 

Depending on your peak hours they could be different:

A variant on the same template sensor

template:
    - sensor:
        - name: "EDF Price"
          unique_id: edf_price
          unit_of_measurement: EUR/kWh
          state:  "
            {% set time = now().hour * 60 + now().minute %}
            {% set startTime = 21 * 60 + 56 %}
            {% set endTime = 5 * 60 + 56 %}
            {% if time >= startTime or time <= endTime %}
            {{'14.70'|float/100}}
            {% else %}
            {{'18.41'|float/100}}
            {% endif %}
            " 

The legacy way of doing it (don’t do this!)

The old way would have been adding a template under the sensor

#old way of doing things
sensor:
  - platform: template
    sensors:   
        edf_price:
            friendly_name: "EDF Price"
            unit_of_measurement: EUR/kWh
            value_template:  "
            {% set time = now().hour * 60 + now().minute %}
            {% if time > 750 and time < 870 or time > 90 and time < 450 %}{{'14.70'|float/100}}
            {% else %}{{'18.41'|float/100}}
            {% endif %}
            "