I finished off the recharging and am now Level 2! I did end up recycling higher level power cubes while double AP was still in effect, until I ran out of keys for blue decaying portals. That got me to about 1800 AP, so I drove to some local portals and recharged them while picking up XM from the ground for the rest.
My next level will be gained by dirty hacking! I figure I’ll need to hack green portals 175 times to level up to 3.