Well like I said, it's not like it matters whether or not you can freeze energy, since you'll run out of characters to help in battle anyway, and you can't fight solo unless you have absolute buttloads of energy potions stocked up or managed to figure out how to lock your health.
It's not like I ignored what you posted, but it seemed to work so I thought maybe I'd done something different that worked while the method you tried didn't or something. I'll go fix the stop sign I ran over and maybe that'll help the ding on my karma.
Incidentally, after it said two items were ready, I collected them and it said the game was out of sync and gave me another two min until the items were ready, at which point I collected them again and had both sets of items collected. Wonder if there's a way to force that to happen again so you can get 2x items produced for the cost of only 1.