In this episode we continue our consideration of what Bill Massey in our first episode this season called "the battle of the statistics" between monopoly and competition advocates. We talk with Michael Giberson, an economist and senior fellow for energy with the R Street Institute, who notes the importance of taking statistics into proper context when attempting to contrast between monopoly utility regulation and competitive markets – particularly the need to account for the impact of inflation when looking at changes in electricity prices over time.

Since the dawn of retail energy competition a quarter century ago, various factions pro and con have engaged in a "battle of the statistics" (as former FERC Commissioner Bill Massey termed it in Episode 1 of this season) regarding the benefits that consumers – particularly residential customers – obtain from competition in retail electricity service. Mostly, these statistical arguments have centered around price savings that residential consumers may or may not have obtained from having a competitive choice in energy suppliers.

In this episode, we hear from Constellation Energy's Rich Spilky, who on behalf of the Retail Energy Supply Association breaks down for us the body of RESA-sponsored work by the late former Illinois utility regulator Phil O'Connor that objectively sought to identify the consumer benefits of customer choice over time, with the price data adjusted for inflation. Spilky assisted O'Connor in these data analyses, which sought to objectively identify which states had effective retail energy competition, and to use federal government statistics to compare the performance of those retail choice states against that of states that retained traditional monopoly price regulation.

The results have been compelling. For both studies that Spilky assisted O'Connor in preparing – Restructuring Recharged and The Great Divergence – as well as in the analyses that Spilky has conducted independently since, this objective methodology has shown that electricity consumers in the 14 jurisdictions with effective customer choice have generally experienced downward price trends while their counterparts without choice in monopoly states have generally experienced upward price trends.

The analyses clearly show "there's something good going on in the competitive states, pricewise and cost-containmentwise, that's not happening in the monopoly states," Spilky says. "I think it's remarkable."

The Biden administration in January announced a pause in reviewing export permits for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in order to better understand the impacts that the United States' world-leading LNG exports will have on domestic natural gas prices, climate change, and environmental equity. Could the pause threaten the U.S.'s position as the world's top LNG supplier?

Charlie Riedl, executive director of the Center for LNG, speaks to the the national security implications of the administration's pause – U.S. LNG was instrumental in Europe's pivot away from Russian gas in the wake of the Ukraine invasion – and says the regulatory action has prompted concerns among European allies and buyers regarding the reliability of the United States as an energy supplier.

The economic and environmental impacts of LNG exports have been studied and restudied, says Riedl, who sees election-year politics prompting the announced review. Given today's record-low prices for natural gas in the U.S. and the projected impact of the Environmental Protection Agency's recently finalized methane emissions-monitoring rules, the outcome of the new review should be a net positive for the industry, he suggests.