I'm surprised no one has been asking about this. This is a great thing. Big, fat gas pipes bring natural gas to the edge of the community. It's high pressure. Then it gets stepped down to low pressure so it doesn't blow the caps off the pipes in people's homes. In the process of taking it from high pressure down to low pressure, the second law of thermodynamics requires that the energy internal in the fluid has to be maintained, so it goes up in temperature as the pressure comes down. That's a consequence of that law.
It draws energy, heat, from the dirt surrounding the pipe. It freezes the earth, cracks the pipe, and causes all kinds of damage, so what they do is burn natural gas to preheat it before it goes through a pressure drop. It's waste upon waste. This is an example of a technology that would be represented in an integrated urban energy system. Enbridge is proposing to put a turbine in the gas flow. Rather than have it draw energy from the surrounding earth as it goes down in pressure, it converts the energy in the pressure into electricity.
You step down the pressure in the pipe by running that high-pressure gas through a turbine so it comes down to the proper level of pressure that's needed to feed the residential community. Then that electricity that's generated by the spinning turbine, just like in a power plant, can be used to power industrial processes, the grid, or the homes directly. It's just identifying an opportunity in the standard ways of doing things. Business as usual is an obstacle to doing things that are innovative and logical.