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.
Where are you, a big city or a small town? In the US or elsewhere?
It may be hit or miss, but depending on where you are, there may be people willing to help without expecting monetary compensation. Charities, e.g. by religious groups, or mutual aid groups (the latter especially in big cities).
I wish you all the best, no person deserves to be abandoned like that.