Is it just a matter of not being worth it? I see cooling towers releasing what appears to be a ton of steam, pretty high up. If that steam were captured at the top and allowed to condense, wouldn’t that result in a ton of water with a lot of gravitational potential energy? That water could then be released and used to power water turbines. Maybe I’m overestimating the amount of water being released as steam, or underestimating how much is needed to spin a water turbine to get a meaningful result, but it seems like wasted energy to me.
Yup. By the time it’s released, most of the energy has already been extracted from the steam. In the boiler, it was high temp and high pressure, then once it’s gone through the turbine(s) it’s cooler and low pressure, not really energetic enough to turn another turbine.
I’m talking about capturing the vapor, letting it condense, and then dropping the condensed water from its capture point. It’s not about exploiting the remaining energy from heat & pressure contained in the steam, but exploiting the gravitational potential energy created from all that water vapor rising and coming out the top of the cooling towers. Kinda like how we create energy batteries by pumping water uphill into a reservoir for later use, except we wouldn’t have to use any additional energy to pump it uphill.
So you want rainpower, but worse? Water batteries are a thing, but the amount of water in that vapor is miniscule compared to the amount required to generate enough energy to make that kind of infrastructure even remotely worth it.