This paper introduces a novel city-level panel of residential electricity prices constructed from the Federal Power Commission's Typical Electric Bills publication series. This dataset represents the most granular and comprehensive historical record of US residential electricity prices yet assembled. Using a spatial difference-in-differences design that matches each municipal utility to its nearest investor-owned neighbor within the same state, I exploit the plausibly exogenous cost shocks of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and 1979 Iranian Revolution to identify the causal effect of utility ownership structure on the pass-through of input cost increases to residential customers. I find that municipal utilities charged significantly less than matched investor-owned utilities in the years following both shocks, on the order of 49 cents per 500 kWh bill in 1970 dollars during the OPEC embargo period and 166 cents during the Iranian Revolution period. A novel decomposition of nominal and real price differentials further reveals that the public-private gap reflects two distinct mechanisms: municipal utilities absorbed a greater share of real oil cost increases, and also passed through general price inflation to residential customers at a lower rate than investor-owned utilities did relative to the cross-utility average. Together, these findings suggest that utility ownership structure has economically meaningful consequences for the distribution of energy cost burdens across households during periods of cost volatility, with implications for contemporary debates about the privatization and regulation of essential network industries.