Obviously, the first thing to say about the pipeline explosion is: Thank goodness no one got hurt. And further: thank goodness that the many utilities running variously toxic and explosive fuels and chemicals around the country are staffed with engineers good enough to ensure that this happens infrequently.
Nonetheless, this is a necessary reminder of the essentially volatile character of much fossil fuel energy. One provocative social theory of the 1990s characterized much of the world today as a "risk society," where risk management and control are the preeminent virtues. However, the paradoxical effect of minimizing risk in daily life is that the risk essentially gets concentrated, and when something goes wrong, it goes wrong big. (If this sounds familiar, it's because it's partly the motivating idea behind Jurassic Park, a decent read because Crichton doesn't pretend to be able to lecture paleontologists on their craft.)
One of the virtues of most renewable energy is that they minimize risk without centralizing and compounding it. Indeed, one benefit of well-designed, thermally efficient buildings is that they can better withstand power outages.
One more reason why clean energy isn't just about global warming.