Playing with inverters and energy-meters I faced the problem that esphome was not compiling my local code changes using the yaml file given by the repo esphome-soyosource-gtn-virtual-meter
According to this manual the yaml file had to be changed to use local sources.
external_components:
- source: ${external_components_source}
refresh: 0s
- source:
type: local
path: components
components: [ soyosource_virtual_meter ]
At the end I used this file for building the firmware for my inverter wifi dongle. It has a web server, uses mqtt for publishing inverter data factoring my local changes to the project.