I know that electricity doesn’t just dissolve in the ground, it must return to the power source. But once the electricity is in the grounding device, how does it find its way back to the substation if it can be relatively far away?
Edit: I know ground isn’t used in normal working mode and where I live there’s no grounding in sockets.
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>how does it find its way back to the substation if it can be relatively far away?
Good news! It doesn’t have to all the way back to the substation. If you live in a properly grounded house, then you have a cable that goes from your panel, outside your house, and connects to a steel plate that lays a couple of feet deep in the ground.
That plate makes sufficient contact with the earth around it that it can drain hazardous voltages safely. Now you might ask why steel? Well steel also conducts electricity, even if not as well as copper, silver or aluminum. The application here also isn’t optimal performance, but making surface contact with the ground.
Remember, the ground is mostly there for safety, so that any fault/hazard currents have a path to get out that is of lower resistance than your body.
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