i.e. to check the energy stored on any consuming entities, on assembly machines for example?
Yeah, anything that consumes energy at a steady rate should do.
Don't think assembler is best candidate, as it can stop/start arbitrarily... maybe an idle inserter, or a special low-power lamp that doesn't have on/off times-of-day.
When your power satisfaction is e.g. 60%, then its stored energy will be at the same 60%, as it can't all be replenished.
Note however that iirc prototypes have power priorities, so high-prio things will probably get 100% while low-prio should get less.
Not sure whether it's significant though, or how these are applied, but might be a good idea to check which protos have that at non-normal and check how power shortage affects such entities compared to others.
to avoid having the solar panels taken into account
If you have enough batteries with solars, I think you can just grab average production value for these from the wiki and ignore the sun entirely for the purposes of such calculations, but as you're talking about power shortage, guess batteries don't play any role there.
You can also subtract solar panel production from W total to not take their production into account.
Given that heating new reactor up will take like a day anyway, maybe there's no point adjusting output for that noise, as by the time exchangers get to 500C, solar panel output will be entirely different anyway, but not sure if maybe it makes more sense with other mods that you might have.