system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: where does 'grounded' electricity go to once it's in the earth?
gpt
Well, first off, household power is AC, so charge never really goes *anywhere*. It just jiggles back and forth in the wire. Anyway...

The same amount of charge is drawn out from the Earth as is put back in. Electricity doesn't work by pumping extra charge into something. Rather, there is charge *already present*, and electricity does stuff by making the already existing charge move.

For an analogy, suppose you have a circular loop pipe that is filled with water. If you leave it alone, the water will obviously just sit there. If you attached a pump to it, you could make the water flow around in a circle, and maybe get it to power something like a wheel or whatever. You're never adding water to the pipe, though. You're just pushing water around. 

Likewise, a grounded circuit is not pushing charge into the Earth. It's just moving the charge that's already there in circles. It takes out just as much as it puts in.

edit: By the way, no real circuit actually pulls or dumps charge into the Earth if it's operating normally, but we don't really need to get into that. Suffice to say that grounding to the actual Earth is a safety precaution in case something goes horribly wrong.