Are energy companies simply raising their prices because they are greedy?

This chart suggests "no."

Here we have three lines: The Producer Price Index for Fuel & Related Products (blue line), the Producer Price Index for Energy (green line) and the Consumer Price Index for Energy (red line). Each of these are percentage change from the previous year.

The Producer Price Index is a measurement of prices the producers of a good/service/commodity face. The Consumer Price Index are the prices consumers of a good/service/commodity face.

A few things to note:

1. The three lines tend to move together. Consumers face higher energy prices at the same time energy producers face higher prices. If energy companies simply raised (or lowered) prices based off greed or any other non-economic excuse, we would not see such correlation (correlation 0.97).

2. The blue and the green lines are above the red line for periods of rising prices almost the entirety of the trend (for sake of ease, I only have this looking back the past 12 years, but it's the same if we go back to the beginning in 1960). This means that the prices energy companies face rise faster than the prices consumers face for energy products. The energy companies absorb some of the cost increases they face; they do not pass it all along to the consumer. If energy companies were greedy and could charge whatever price they wanted, we would expect the CPI growth rates to be at or higher than the PPI growth rates.