Afternoon rank about spotprices2ha

[T3m3z]

Yes, your use case seems to reasonable.

Maybe something like below would suite your needs? That could be used as an automation condition to decide whether to turn on/off heating. You give start time, stop time and desired "rank" X. The code searches for Xth cheapest hour during the desired period and stores the price of that hour to variable "limit". And finally the code checks whether we are in currently in the desired time period and whether the current electricity price is lower than the limit found.

This way you don't need to calculate ranks for each hour and store the results of that. Maybe not the most elegant solution but this should give you needed tools to fulfill your use case. Please test this thoroughly as I just wrote the code quite quickly as an starting point for you.

{% set start = today_at("12:00") %}
{% set stop = start + timedelta(hours=6) %}
{% set rank = 3  %}

{% set limit = (state_attr('sensor.shf_data', 'data') | selectattr("Timestamp", "ge", start | as_timestamp) | selectattr("Timestamp", "lt", stop | as_timestamp) | sort(attribute="TotalPrice"))[rank]["TotalPrice"] %}

{{ now() > start and now() < stop and states('sensor.shf_electricity_price_now') | float < limit }}