With regular engines the cycle time gets shorter the closer they are max power. Is it the same with electric engines? I thought electric engines used to have a directly selectable cycle time, but maybe the best you can do is run an LV engine at max power rather than an MV engine at half power, unless as I suggested before, you can screwdriver the MV engine to max, and also limit it to half with a selector.
It used to be that when pressing sugar cane you wanted to stick to a fully powered bronze engine and nothing higher or it would waste energy as you are seeing, but I thought that the addition of the 4x batches fixed that.