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.
The energy generated by such a construction would be proportional to the mass of water that falls (as is basically every other form of energy generation), which is a problem because the m here is way too small to be worth it. The steam looks like a lot because you’re going by volume, but gases in general are just really light. To get an idea of how light, steam at 125C will shrink to 1/1800 of its volume when it’s condensed into water. In other words, a 1-meter cube of steam would become an 8cm cube of water. You can find this out by plugging the numbers into the ideal gas law, but either way there’s just not enough steam up there to be worth it.