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.
In: 469
Electricity can just “dissolve” into the ground, although a more accurate term is disperse.
The power stations run on AC, or alternating current. That means the electricity is switching directions within the wire constantly. It does this because the electrons are essentially being pushed and pulled by a giant coil of wire passing by giant magnets. So the grid is not relying on the potential between it’s positive and negative to encourage electricity to flow like you would see in a battery. It’s using the strength of the magnetic fields to move them.
Electricity is electrons, which are all negatively charged, and they want to get the heck away from each other and spread out and it will seek out the path of least resistance to do so. The electricity is contained in the wire, but there’s a potential difference (high energy to low energy) between that wire and everything else. This potential encourages the electricity to want to spread out to everything it can. This is generally prevented by the wire insulation.
But what happens when the insulation fails or someone plugs something in they shouldn’t? Electricity will quickly look for new paths to spread out. You, the appliance, the walls, the copper piping, etc.
What grounding does is offer a very convenient path for electricity to disperse into the earth, away from things you want to protect. This does two things. It protects objects from absorbing electrical energy, which could be enough to light them on fire (or kill you), and also allows for a spike in the current flow which will trip the main circuit breakers and cut off the electricity completely.
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