A really important thing happened last month to New York City and the rest of the mid-Atlantic. This event will change the daily lives of millions of people, especially during the coldest months of winter. And, despite some protesters, it all went down with less fanfare than Jay Z and Beyonce going vegan for a month.
An $856-million pipeline expansion began ramping up service, allowing more natural gas to get to New York City consumers. The New York-New Jersey expansion project moves more gas the last few miles from Jersey, which is the terminus for much of the Marcellus Shale gas flowing out of Pennsylvania, into Manhattan. The Energy Information Administration called it "one of the biggest... expansions in the Northeast during the past two decades." It will bring an additional 800 billion British thermal units (BTU) of gas to the area per day.
For scale: BTU is about the energy expended when you light a match. A homeowner might use a few tens of millions of BTU to heat a house over a entire winter. In rough terms, the gas flowing through the pipeline could heat 2 million homes. (All these estimates depend heavily on climatic variations, home efficiency, and other factors.)
Another way to think about it is to look at the physical infrastructure that got quietly installed: 4.8 miles of 42-inch pipe between Linden, New Jersey, and Staten Island. 15.2 more miles of 30-inch pipe from Linden to ConEd in lower Manhattan.