At places the huge towers holding the humming cables that carry th eelectricity, you will see nothing or no one around, Everyone is scared to go near that. If it rains, it could kill. If there is a leakage of any sort, you could be dead. And if you dont die, you will spend the rest of your life in complete misery. The shock would be that powerful. 500 KV, Thats about 5000 times the voltage of what comes in the average household power socket in the US, and about 2500 times, what comes in many other parts of the world.

These lines are always headed to a sub station that will be located at the outskirts of a city. Such substations will be loaded with transformers everywhere, supplying each induvidual circuit that it connects to. Various power stations have different billing patterns, and the circuits differ according to the billing pattern. In places, resistive load, such as power that is used for lights and heaters are charged less, and power used for running inductive load such as Fans, ACs, Refrigerators, or anything at all thats associated with a coil or a motor inside is charged more.

There is something called a power factor that is used when calculating the total power consumed. For resistive load, the power factor is 1, and when you multiply V and I, you get the power, V being the Voltage and I being the current, so a light bulb drawing 1 Ampere of current at 110 volts is a 110 watts bulb since the powerfactor is 1, there is no difference.

But in inductive load, there is a power factor of 0.8 that that is included while calcualting power for inductive loads. Lets say a Refrigerator draws 3 amperes of current at 220 volts, and without the power factor taken into consideration, the total power that it consumes is clearly 660 Watts. But with the power factor, you would be consuming only 530 watts. At places where inductive load is not charged higher, they are given a common slab and they end up paying for 660 watts while their usage is only 530 watts, and when paying for inductive load seperately, you pay more money for the 530 watts. So its more or less the same, and it depends on your usage.

Coming back to the sub stations, several transformers are connected to these individual circuits. These transformers are supplied power by a very huge transformer that steps down the voltage from the high tension lines.

Power is then distributed from independent transformers to various local transformers in the city at a tension of 11KV or 11000 Volts.