There’s so much years old anti storage propaganda in your text, it’s painful.
Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet
What makes a tech mature to you? We have all the components of a hydrogen storage path up and running everywhere around the world. They’re not profitable, at least not without government incentives, but solarpunk is anti-capitalist, so profitability shouldn’t be among our primary concerns.
something like 35% round-trip efficiency
That’s a worst case figure for purely electrical round trip efficiency. We could use waste heat of the fuel cell process (to a lesser extent also the electrolysis process) in order to bump that number up considerably.
not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size
That has not been an issue for quite some time thanks to advances in materials science. Also, we could use methanation, of course sacrificing some more efficiency, but then we could even use old natural gas infrastructure without an issue.
Shouldn’t even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.
Lithium-ion batteries are environmentally bad for sure, but talking about thermal runaway? Really? You need very high temperatures for that to happen. Most stationary storage applications will never see such high powers that they come even close to thermal runaway by themselves. If in a high power application, you’ll have better battery management systems supervising the temperature and reducing the allowed power. It’s really a non-issue if you have engineers who know what they’re doing working on it.
Coming bad to environmentally bad: see sodium-ion batteries.
I’m not an egoist anarchist, but the other answer to your question is wrong and I don’t want it to be standing there without correction. Egoism in an anarchist context goes back to “The Ego and His own” by Max Stirner, a German philosopher. He was not an anarchist, but has been and is still very influential on the movement.
Here’s his works on the anarchist library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/max-stirner
I haven’t read it myself yet, but read some short summaries. Afaik he wants everyone to acknowledge that we’re basically working in our own self-interest all of the time BUT that this requires cooperation and that helping others without immediate material benefit can be part of our self-interest, e.g. because it makes us feel good or because it builds relationships that might be beneficial later.