Now that ZPMs no longer appear in jungle temples (#311), the only way to get ZPMs is to craft them. However, they are completely useless as batteries because they are empty when crafted and cannot be recharged; as a result I now have some very expensive bricks. Alternatively, perhaps ZPMs should come fully charged when crafted.

ZPMs are pretty much only useful as crafting materials for endgame energy-related items. GTCE batteries behave strangely in CEFs (keep in mind CEFs are a separate mod) and very few people actually use Battery Buffers in this pack, so ZPMs would not be particularly convenient methods of storing power.

A ZPM coming fully charged when crafted would be giving players a free immense amount of power. They could not be charged up in 1.2.1 either, and finding them in chests back then completely broke the early game balance as a single one of those things could keep you rolling easily into midgame or later without making any other power generation infrastructure.

If updating GTCE or SoG happens to fix the ability to charge them, it will work at that time. Otherwise we have no control over that. We are using v1.8.4 which is rather outdated, because the newer versions of GTCE include substantial changes to core mechanics that would both have been jarring to spring on players for 1.2.2 and require a lot of extra testing and tweaking to make sure the pack progression is still fully doable (which is why that effort was deferred for 1.3).