Reclaiming should not cost energy

Fabbers can use or reclaim metal. Energy is simple, is this unit on or off? If on (using its nanolathe) then it costs energy. Makes sense to me the way it is. Maybe reclaiming can incur a smaller cost in energy though to make up for the reduction in metal gained.

Well you don't recall correctly. TA didn't store the remaining mass of a wreck or environment item and gave the entire energy and metal yield at the end. You couldn't take multiple bites at it. And judging from your second comment I assume you're okay with metal storage being a complete waste of time then?

You do realise that that makes reclaim suck right? Wrecks already return much less mass in PA because their mass value is based on their integrity, and now you want to pay for reclaim in energy at 1000 energy per tick to get 10 metal per tick? Construction units are already the least energy efficient units in the game, and with the current system it means you have to reserve pgens for the sole purpose of taking advantage of reclaim because your energy usage spikes while you're reclaiming.

Then build energy storages of have an energy surplus? Reclaiming simply has a little downside and that is that it requires energy. It's like a situational way to turn energy into metal.

Why does it need a downside? It's not a "situational way to turn energy into metal", the whole point of reclaim is to encourage taking and holding areas and discourage feeding your units into the enemy guns to no gain. The "downside" is that you need to go and get it.