TARIFF-10: configuring a price provider is what fetches prices

amain() started the background tariff refresh only when arbitrage_enabled was
on, and that option ships false. run_tariff_refresh is the only caller of
resolve_tariff(), which is the only caller of price_history.carry() - so on a
shipped install with a price provider configured nothing was ever fetched: no
plan resolved, /data/price_history.json never created, the Price history status
row reading `empty` for the life of the install, and TARIFF-09's short-horizon
warning unable to fire because there was no fetch to warn about. Measured over
a 40 h two-instance soak on one feed: 0 requests and `present: false` across all
802 samples, against a resolved 132-point plan on the instance with arbitrage
armed.

git log -S puts the refresh task, its arbitrage.enabled() guard AND the DOCS.md
sentence saying a configured provider still fetches in the same commit - OPT-04,
bdd7f18; config.yaml has carried the claim since TARIFF-02, 852fc7c. The prose
and the code disagreed from the moment both existed and nothing compared them.
config.yaml and both translations additionally carried a claim that had rotted
the other way - "nothing consumes the price series yet", untrue since OPT-04
shipped the consumer. All four surfaces now say what the add-on does, and a
check pairs DOCS against the DRIVEN behaviour so they cannot drift again.

The gate is tariff_refresh_wanted() = provider_configured(opts) or
arbitrage.enabled(opts), and the `or` is a STRICT WIDENING: every configuration
that started the task before still starts it. The second term is not there for
symmetry. price_provider: off + a static_profile + arbitrage_enabled: true is a
configuration validate.py explicitly ACCEPTS and it trades - measured, at
cycle_cost_threshold_eur 0.05 on a 0.20/0.284 day/night profile,
ARBITRAGE_CHARGE -5000 W. Gating on the provider alone would leave that site's
tariff_plan at None forever and answer "no tariff plan has been resolved yet" on
every cycle, silently disarming a strategy the UI says is running.

Nothing acquires a periodic HTTPS call. With price_provider off, resolve_tariff()
answers out of the static profile without opening a socket (driven and counted:
0 requests), and the true shipped default - no provider, no trading - starts no
task at all. What decides whether a request leaves the machine is price_provider
and only that. The literal reading of the ticket's AC2 - drop the `or` - is one
token and is recorded in DECISIONS §3 with what it costs, for the owner.

AND NOTHING TRADES THAT DID NOT TRADE BEFORE. cycle()'s
`if arbitrage.enabled(self.o):` is untouched, and that is graded directly rather
than inferred from the gate having moved: Controller.cycle() is driven on a
resolved provider plan with the peak guard asserted clear, and arbitrage_enabled
is the only option that moves between the rows - false/false give +180 W
("loop -> 180 W") on both the cheap-now and dear-now plans, true/true give
-5000 W and +5000 W ("arbitrage -> ...").

TariffPlan.cheap_now() is deliberately NOT wired, decided rather than inherited
(DECISIONS §4). A provider-backed plan now exists on every configured site, so
Cheap window could read it - and Cheap window feeds the maintenance cycle's grid
top-up, the one place a price moves energy without trading being armed. On a
provider-only site static_status() returns False on every cycle, so adopting it
would take a paid grid top-up from never to sometimes. self.cheap stays on
static_status(); what adoption would take is listed rather than left implied.

THE CHECK THAT WOULD HAVE CAUGHT THIS is test_price.py section 13, and it grades
REACHABILITY FROM A CONFIGURATION rather than the shape of an `if` - the `if` was
exactly what somebody meant to write. amain()'s guards are EVALUATED against real
option dicts, whatever they are spelled as; the call graph under app/ is walked
to see whether the tasks those guards start arrive at resolve_tariff(), wherever
it has moved to; and then the fetch is DRIVEN with a counting transport, because
a graph is an argument and a counted request is an observation. What the
instrument cannot see is printed on every run, largest hole first.

Evidence: 29/29 green. 13 mutations in 14 runs - M10 re-run as M10b once it was
closed - each applied to a fresh cp -a of the clean worktree rather than
reverted (MUTATION.md habit 18), purged, :ro, -B. The
shipped defect - the gate back at arbitrage.enabled(opts), -4 B - is red on
seven named checks. Dropping the `or` (-27 B) is red on the strict-widening row;
removing cycle()'s trading gate (+8 B) is red on both AC3 rows. The instrument
is mutated too (habit 16): _reaches() always True and _task_sites() returning []
are both +0 B and both red.

Two findings are recorded rather than rounded off. provider_id() dropping
.strip() (-8 B) was a real SURVIVOR across four price suites - nothing fed a
padded provider id - and is closed in this commit by the padded-id pair; and the
first draft of the AC3 fixture fed five minutes of P1 telegrams, so whether the
peak guard was blind depended on where the wall clock sat inside the billing
quarter and the armed baseline failed to trade on some runs. It is 900 s now,
and the guard's clear state is a check rather than an assumption.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BwRLw7eKYj2byVdwB6kbjU

goodwe_controller/app/main.py

@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ from .mqtt import (MqttPublisher, announced_units, unit_slugs,
 from . import peakguard
 from . import packshare
 from .p1 import P1Ingest, build_source, is_enabled
-from .price import Uncertainty, price_option
+from .price import Uncertainty, price_option, provider_configured
 from .price_history import PriceHistory
 from .static_tariff import resolve_tariff, static_status
 from .tariff import PeakStore, PeakTracker
@@ -138,6 +138,60 @@ TARIFF_REFRESH_S = 1800.0
 TARIFF_MAX_AGE_S = 3 * TARIFF_REFRESH_S
 
 
+def tariff_refresh_wanted(opts: dict) -> bool:
+    """TARIFF-10. Does this install need the background tariff refresh at all?
+
+    THE DEFECT THIS PREVENTS, and it shipped: the gate below used to be
+    `arbitrage.enabled(opts)` alone. That option defaults to `false`, and
+    `run_tariff_refresh` is the only caller of `resolve_tariff()`, which is the
+    only caller of `price_history.carry()` - so on a shipped install with a
+    provider configured NOTHING was ever fetched, no plan was ever resolved,
+    `/data/price_history.json` was never created, the *Price history* row read
+    `empty` forever, and TARIFF-09's short-horizon warning could not fire
+    because there was no fetch to warn about. Measured over a 40 h soak of two
+    instances side by side: zero feed requests and `present: false` across all
+    802 samples on the shipped default, against a resolved plan from the same
+    feed on the instance with arbitrage armed. ⚠️ AND `DOCS.md` HAS
+    DESCRIBED THE BEHAVIOUR BELOW SINCE THE COMMIT THAT WROTE THE GATE:
+    OPT-04 (bdd7f18) added the refresh task, the `arbitrage.enabled()` guard on
+    it, and the sentence saying a configured provider still fetches, all in one
+    change. config.yaml has said it since TARIFF-02 (852fc7c).
+
+    Two terms, and they answer two different questions:
+
+      provider_configured(opts) -> "the operator asked for a price feed", so
+                                   fetch it, validate it and record the day
+                                   (§8.3). This is the term TARIFF-10 ADDS.
+      arbitrage.enabled(opts)   -> "the operator armed trading". This term is
+                                   what the gate USED to be, kept verbatim.
+
+    ⚠️ IT IS AN `or`, SO THE GATE IS A STRICT WIDENING. Every configuration
+    that started this task before still starts it; none that did not start it
+    stops anything. That matters because the second term is not redundant:
+    `price_provider: off` + a `static_profile` + `arbitrage_enabled: true` is a
+    configuration validate.py explicitly ACCEPTS, and it trades - measured, at
+    `cycle_cost_threshold_eur: 0.05` on a 0.20/0.284 day/night profile,
+    `ARBITRAGE_CHARGE -5000 W`. Dropping that term to make the gate read
+    `provider_configured(opts)` alone would leave `self.tariff_plan` at None on
+    that site forever and `decide()` would answer "no tariff plan has been
+    resolved yet" on every cycle - silently disarming a strategy the UI says is
+    running, which is the exact failure validate.py's OPT-04 rules exist to
+    refuse.
+
+    ⚠️ AND NO CONFIGURATION ACQUIRES A PERIODIC HTTPS CALL FROM THIS TICKET.
+    With `price_provider` off, `resolve_tariff()` returns `static_plan()` - pure
+    arithmetic, no socket - so the second term starts a task that fetches
+    nothing. The true shipped default (no provider, no arbitrage) starts no
+    task at all. What is fetched is decided by the FIRST term only.
+
+    ⚠️ THIS IS NOT A TRADING SWITCH. It decides whether prices are LOOKED UP.
+    Whether they move energy is `arbitrage.enabled()` at the one call site in
+    `cycle()`, and TARIFF-10 did not touch it: `arbitrage_enabled: false` still
+    means no trade, ever, on any configuration.
+    """
+    return provider_configured(opts) or arbitrage.enabled(opts)
+
+
 def load_options() -> dict:
     try:
         with open(OPTIONS_PATH, "r", encoding="utf-8") as fh:
@@ -4353,6 +4407,14 @@ class Controller:
             # OPT-04. The strategy's own sentence, not a re-derivation of it -
             # every refusal it can make already carries a reason a human can
             # act on, and "Arbitrage: no" would throw all of them away.
+            #
+            # ⚠️ TARIFF-10 RE-READ THIS STRING AND LEFT IT ALONE, which is worth
+            # saying because that card is about the two switches being
+            # different. `self.arb` is None if and only if
+            # `arbitrage.enabled(self.o)` was False, so `off (arbitrage_enabled)`
+            # still names the option that is actually off - and on a site with a
+            # provider configured it is now the row that says the prices
+            # arriving on the *Price history* row above are moving nothing.
             ("Arbitrage", "off (arbitrage_enabled)" if self.arb is None
              else self.arb.explain()),
         ]
@@ -4605,11 +4667,16 @@ async def amain() -> None:
         # ESP32 heartbeat. A fetch on that path is a supplier's TLS timeout able
         # to push this add-on towards layer 1's 30 s veto. See TARIFF_REFRESH_S.
         #
-        # ⚠️ STARTED ONLY WHEN ARBITRAGE IS ARMED. Nothing else in the add-on
-        # reads the resolved plan - `cheap` still comes from static_status() on
-        # the tick, which is pure - so on a default install this task would be
-        # network traffic in aid of an attribute nobody reads.
-        if arbitrage.enabled(opts):
+        # ⚠️ STARTED WHEN A PROVIDER IS CONFIGURED, *OR* WHEN TRADING IS ARMED
+        # - TARIFF-10, and it used to be the second term alone. `arbitrage_
+        # enabled` ships `false`, so a site that had selected a price feed
+        # fetched nothing at all; the whole argument, the measurement and what
+        # the `or` is protecting are in `tariff_refresh_wanted()` above.
+        #
+        # ⚠️ IT DOES NOT ARM ANYTHING. Fetching a price and trading on one are
+        # two decisions; this is the first, and `cycle()`'s
+        # `if arbitrage.enabled(self.o):` is still the only gate on the second.
+        if tariff_refresh_wanted(opts):
             tasks.append(asyncio.create_task(controller.run_tariff_refresh()))
 
         # P1 ingestion runs as its own long-lived task. ⚠️ It must not be driven

goodwe_controller/app/price.py

@@ -766,6 +766,47 @@ def price_option(opts: dict, key: str):
     return v
 
 
+def provider_id(opts: dict) -> str:
+    """The selected plugin id, normalised. `"off"` when none is selected.
+
+    ⚠️ ONE SPELLING OF THIS EXPRESSION, AND TARIFF-10 IS WHY IT IS A FUNCTION.
+    `str(price_option(opts, "price_provider") or "off").strip()` was written out
+    twice - in `load_prices()` below and in `static_tariff.resolve_tariff()` -
+    and main.py's startup gate would have been a third. "Is a provider
+    configured" is now a DECISION the add-on takes (it is what starts the
+    background refresh), and a decision spelled out at three call sites is three
+    places to disagree about whether `"  off  "` or `None` counts.
+    ⚠️ `validate.py` deliberately keeps its own reader: it validates the RAW
+    options blob, including one the Supervisor never saw, so it must not route
+    through `price_option()`'s defaults. Note what this does NOT do: it does not
+    decide
+    whether the id names a shipped plugin - `load_prices()` and validate.py's
+    rule 7 own that, and answering "unknown" here would turn a typo into
+    "no provider" instead of into a startup refusal.
+    """
+    return str(price_option(opts, "price_provider") or "off").strip()
+
+
+def provider_configured(opts: dict) -> bool:
+    """Has the operator selected a price feed at all? (TARIFF-10)
+
+    THE DEFECT THIS PREVENTS: the background tariff refresh used to start only
+    when `arbitrage_enabled` was on, which ships `false` - so a site with a
+    provider configured fetched NOTHING, ever. `/data/price_history.json` was
+    never created, the *Price history* status row read `empty` forever, and
+    TARIFF-09's short-horizon warning could not fire because no fetch happened
+    to warn about. Measured over a 40 h two-instance soak: zero feed requests
+    and `present: false` across all 802 samples on the shipped default, against
+    a resolved plan on the same feed with arbitrage armed.
+
+    ⚠️ THIS IS NOT A TRADING SWITCH AND MUST NEVER BECOME ONE. It answers
+    "fetch prices?"; `arbitrage.enabled()` answers "move energy on them?", and
+    §10.1's priority 3 is gated on the second alone. See
+    `main.tariff_refresh_wanted()` for the one place the two meet.
+    """
+    return provider_id(opts) not in ("", "off")
+
+
 def export_price_eur_kwh(opts: dict) -> float:
     """AC4 / §9.3: the injection price is a SEPARATE SCALAR, not a second series.
 
@@ -1516,8 +1557,8 @@ async def load_prices(opts: dict, since: datetime, until: datetime,
     site condition, it is a plugin trying to read the markup, and turning it
     into "no price data" would hide the exact defect trap 1 exists to catch.
     """
-    pid = str(price_option(opts, "price_provider") or "off").strip()
-    if pid in ("", "off"):
+    pid = provider_id(opts)
+    if not provider_configured(opts):
         return PriceRead.no_data(
             "no price provider configured (price_provider is 'off'); "
             "§11.4: static profile, plan provisional, no arbitrage")

goodwe_controller/app/static_tariff.py

@@ -207,7 +207,7 @@ from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone
 from .price import (
     MAX_PLAUSIBLE_EUR_KWH, Absence, PricePoint, PriceProduct, PriceRead,
     Uncertainty, _Outcome, brussels, load_prices, price_option,
-    required_spread, uncertainty_of, widen_factor,
+    provider_configured, required_spread, uncertainty_of, widen_factor,
 )
 
 _LOG = logging.getLogger("goodwe.tariff.static")
@@ -1071,8 +1071,7 @@ async def resolve_tariff(opts: dict, since: datetime, until: datetime,
     missing and loses the elapsed ones it should never have had.
     """
     stamp = now or datetime.now(timezone.utc)
-    pid = str(price_option(opts, "price_provider") or "off").strip()
-    if pid in ("", "off"):
+    if not provider_configured(opts):
         return static_plan(opts, since, until, provisional=False, now=stamp)
 
     read = await load_prices(opts, since, until, transport)