Don't wait for power to recharge, just use a item as fuel to recharge 50% of the energy, its explained on the tutorial at the start.
Break something in multiple parts with "Rough", use one part to get energy and use that energy to uprade the other parts with "coarse" and then "fine", that's the game loop, waiting is pointless since it takes almost 10 minutes to generate the energy you get for each go of that game loop and don't even get the extra items.