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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>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?
Individual electrons dont “need” to find their way back to the source. They’re not sent from a generator to your lamp to be consumed like food and sent back to be recycled. Electricity is like a game of musical chairs in your high school gym. The wire from generator, to your house and back, is like the ring of chairs. As long as the music plays(voltage), electrons move around. When the music stops, individual electrons don’t care where they are they just find the closest chair(positively charged atom) to sit in. In the game when you don’t have a chair to sit in, you’re out of the game. So you walk over to the bleachers and have a seat. Ground is a path to the bleachers. Out of the game but it’s still an empty seat available for you to sit in.
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