Lisa Epfani joins us this month to tell us about her exciting work as the Head of Policy for X, The Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X). She also provides a detailed take on current energy policy in the U.S., shares wonderful stories about Al Hubbard and President Bush, and explains why Karl Rove called her, “Nu-cu-lar Girl.”
Q: What can you tell us about your work as the Head of Policy for X, The Moonshot Factory (formerly known as Google X)?
X, The Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X) is an innovation engine inside Alphabet. Our inventors, engineers, designers, and makers apply audacious thinking and radical new technology to huge problems. Our goal is to develop and de-risk early-stage technologies and transform them into products that can be the foundation for large, sustainable businesses. X is focused on transformative change; that is, technology that can have a 10x magnitude improvement, rather than a 10% difference, and we typically work on problems that can be solved in a 5-10 year timeframe. Some of our “graduates” out of X have been Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car moonshot; Verily, our precision health company; Wing, our drone delivery company; Mineral, our computational agriculture company; and many more.
Before I tell you about my work, allow me to set the stage of what it is like inside X. Imagine a village of incredibly enthusiastic, inspiring, slightly quirky geniuses that are developing sci-fi sounding solutions for the world’s hardest problems, and you will start to get a sense of the place. When you walk into the Factory, you sense the buzzy energy bouncing off the walls of our awesome building (a former 1960s era shopping mall) with its high ceilings, exposed concrete and steel, and skate-worthy walkways. Our CEO, Astro Teller, wears rollerblades every day and claims they save him eight minutes a day in travel time. Having fun while tackling the world’s hardest problems is an important part of how X operates.
I joined X in September 2022 as the Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy. My job is to help projects at X projects understand government actions and policy direction that can advance their project goals and avoid potential policy or political barriers. There are multiple early stage projects at different levels of development (e.g., initial ideation to pilot) exploring various issues under the roof of the Factory.
Today, our projects are exploring issues in climate, advanced biology, communications, and the future of computing. My background, which has been heavily focused on energy issues like electricity, oil and gas, and climate change, gives me a good base for many of our projects, and there is so much more that I get to learn every day. For example, our project called Taara is our moonshot to expand global access to fast, affordable internet using beams of light! Wireless optical communications technology is a new issue for me, and it is super exciting to get to work on new challenges every day.
Q: Can you take us on a deep dive about one of X’s projects?
Our moonshot project called Tapestry is focused on electric grids. Our own North American power grid is often called the world’s largest machine. It is a huge network of generating facilities, transmission lines, and distribution centers that requires perfect balance between supply and demand every second. Designed more than a century ago to function like a one-way highway, with electricity flowing from power plants to cities and towns, the grid of the past cannot meet the expectations of a modern world. The grid of the future will be more complex and will face a system that is more decentralized in control, distributed in functionality, and highly variable in both generation and consumption of electricity.
Increasingly, the grid looks like a multidirectional superhighway. Billions of devices ranging from home solar panels and wind farms, to microgrids and electric vehicles are pushing and pulling energy to and from the grid all the time. Yet, no one currently has the tools they need to see, manage or plan a grid this complex. Information is siloed between dozens of different organizations and no one has a complete picture of how electricity is made, moved and used.
Tapestry’s moonshot is to create a single virtualized view of the electricity system that can predict and simulate what might happen on the grid from nanoseconds to decades into the future. Insights from such computational models can lead to reduced energy consumption, lower emissions, and improved resilience to outages, and reduce interconnection queues, enabling more renewable energy capacity to be added to the grid.
Tapestry is developing new AI-powered tools to map and plan the grid. By developing highly accurate grid models, Tapestry can help electric utilities better manage assets with digitized inspections, optimized operations, and improved grid reliability using geospatial awareness.
Q: How did your journey – as a Senate staffer, in the Administration, as an attorney, and in the corporate world at Chevron – prepare you for the work you’re doing today?
My time in DC and at Chevron taught me a lot about staying curious, creative, and confident. Staying curious is all about having a growth mindset and being in love with learning. As a Hill staffer and at the White House, I was so lucky to be able to ask energy experts to share their time and insights about the issues and challenges we were working to address. For example, I got to learn about nuclear energy from the late Dr. Pete Lyons, who served on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources (SENR) Committee as Science Advisor. Before joining SENR, Pete had spent decades working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he supported nuclear test diagnostics. Pete also served as a Commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and as DOE Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy. Pete was an incredibly kind person and an inspiring teacher. I vividly recall working late one night in the SENR office trying to figure out how to make a Renewable Portfolio Standard bill concept more economic. Pete asked me why I was limiting the concept to renewables only and that made me realize that including nuclear power into a Clean Energy Standard could make the generation costs more affordable. Thanks to Pete Lyons, I became an advocate for the benefits of nuclear energy. I am proud to share that when I was at the NEC, my pro-nuclear power enthusiasm was noticed by Karl Rove, who honored me with the sobriquet “nu-cu-lar girl.”
In addition to the value of staying curious, my previous roles taught me that it is important to embrace creativity. I like to think about work as problem solving, and solving problems means bringing all ideas – good, bad, kooky – to the table. By being willing to consider all ideas, you can find new combinations, different angles, or unexpected partners that lead to good outcomes.
My previous roles also taught me that confidence is critical. The first time that I got to lead Policy Time for President Bush and several Cabinet members in the Roosevelt Room I remember feeling anxious and super excited. My boss Al Hubbard had helped me thoroughly prepare, and I was ready. Before walking in that room, I remember reminding myself of all my hard work and accomplishments and framing that day as just another chance to do my best. Now, whenever I am facing a challenging presentation or situation, I just think to myself, if I can rock a preso for the President of the United States and Cabinet members, everything else is a piece of cake.
Q: Where are we as a country in terms of getting long term energy policy right?
Energy policy is an ever-evolving area. In the U.S, we ask our energy policy to do a lot of different things, often at the same time, and that makes predicting the long term pathway hard. The way I see it, we use energy policy to help us address various critical areas described below. Please note that the ideas below represent only my own opinions.
Decarbonization: Energy policy plays a pivotal role in helping us reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The government can use sticks (mandates/penalties) and carrots (incentives) to encourage the pursuit of ever cleaner energy resources. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) was a landmark legislation that embraced the carrot method with billions of dollars in tax credits and other incentives to help accelerate the adoption of clean and renewable energy. I think that the government has placed big, smart bets across many technologies, but it will take time to see how big the winnings will be for our economy and environment.
Industrialization: In addition to trying to drive decarbonization, the IRA also had an industrialization goal. Trying to restore industry and simultaneously seek to lower overall emissions is a hard balancing act, and time will tell if we can find the right balance to foster cleaner, stronger industrial progress. I think the IRA is a very good start, but policymakers need to continue to make policies that encourage energy infrastructure development that can provide affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner energy to support energy-intensive industries.
Trade: Energy policy can be used to affect trade dynamics. Increasing domestic production of energy can reduce dependency on imports and can create new export opportunities. The current hot trade debate is about carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs), which are basically tariffs on the importation of goods based on the CO2 emissions attributable to manufacturing and delivering those goods (sometimes referred to as “embedded” emissions). In October, the EU started the first phase of its CBAM program, which requires reporting on embedded emissions from imports of steel, cement, and other goods. In 2026, the EU plans to impose CBAMs (fees) on those goods. In Congress, there are several bills being considered that study or propose to impose fees on certain carbon-intensive imports (i.e., pollution fees). While I think that there are potential benefits from CBAMs, like protecting domestic industry from competition that does not have the same environmental standards, I think that there are also potential drawbacks like increased consumer costs and less friendly trade partners. The design and governance of any kind of CBAM system will determine if they can lead to more carbon reductions or if they lead to new trade wars. Until there is some kind of a global carbon accounting system in place, I think that CBAMs or other carbon-based import fees will be challenging to operationalize. Our energy policy is just beginning to grapple with this challenge.
Security: Our national security depends on a reliable and secure supply of energy. Energy policy sets the rules for the physical and cyber security of our energy resources and infrastructure. For example, safe and resilient infrastructure can help us prepare for natural disasters. This requires steady investment and innovation. Diversified resources can help minimize vulnerabilities. This means encouraging renewables, promoting energy efficiency, and expanding our energy options with new technologies like carbon capture and storage and advanced nuclear power. I also think this includes the significant contributions that natural gas and crude oil from shale and tight rock formations make to our country’s energy supply security. Next, there is ever-increasing attention from policymakers on the importance of safeguarding our energy system from cyberattacks.
Geopolitics: Energy policy can also be a lever for geopolitical influence. The war in the Ukraine is a real-time example of energy being used as a weapon. Countries can also use energy policy to strengthen alliances and promote stability. I think that our ability to leverage U.S. natural gas and oil resources has contributed significantly to our country’s current geopolitical strength. To maintain that position of strength, we will need continued investment and innovation on all our energy resources to constantly pursue a principle of affordable, reliable and ever-cleaner energy.
Justice and equity: We also sometimes use our energy policy to drive justice and equity issues. The IRA, for example, in addition to promoting decarbonization and industrialization, also included provisions to address environmental justice, such as climate justice grants for disadvantaged communities and clean energy workforce development program funding to help prepare disadvantaged communities for jobs in the clean energy sector. The IRA also included provisions to incentivize the use of union labor. Given the interconnected nature of justice, climate, and economic progress, I think our energy policies are trending in the right direction in terms of actively considering the issues of justice and equity. Finding the balance between local concerns and national needs will sometimes, however, be the challenge policymakers have to face.
Conclusion: There are so many more issues and angles that we could consider about the long term direction of our country’s energy policy such as adaptation, the energy-water nexus, semiconductor manufacturing, access to critical minerals, and more, but overall I think our energy future is heading in a positive direction. I also want to note that I think that U.S. oil and gas companies should be acknowledged for the important role that they have to play in the energy transition. My belief in the sector comes from growing up in the energy capital of Houston and having the privilege to work at one of the world’s leading oil and gas companies, Chevron. Companies like Chevron have the resources, the workforce, and the experience to be the leaders in the energy transition. I also believe that technology leaders like Google are essential to help develop new solutions and drive innovation. I am very excited about the potential of AI to accelerate climate action, which many projects at X, The Moonshot Factory are exploring.
Q: Can you leave us with a favorite story (or could be leadership lesson?) from your time in the Administration?
President Bush is a beloved leader for many reasons. I loved getting to see his sense of humor in action and watch him masterfully put people at ease. In 2006, we were taking the President on an energy visit to tour the California Fuel Cell Partnership. The Partnership had a facility that housed various auto makers, energy companies, and fuel cell technology companies under one roof to work to advance the promise of hydrogen. It was part of my job on energy visits to go a day ahead and do a walk-through playing the part of the President with the people participating in the visit.
During my walk-through at the Partnership, I was talking to some of the mechanics who were going to meet President Bush and asking them what they would like to say. One gentleman named Tom got very flustered just rehearsing with me. He said he did not know what to say to the President and wanted to drop out. I thought Tom was such a nice person. I wanted him to get to meet the President, so I kept chatting with him about his work. We figured out that he had been working on cars for the same automaker for over 20 years, and this work on hydrogen was new for Tom. I told him that talking about the new path in his career would be great to share with President Bush.
The next day, I kept my fingers crossed that Tom would stay confident, and he was tremendous! When President Bush went up on stage to talk about his visit, he highlighted meeting Tom and even teased him for being an old dog learning new tricks. I can still see Tom standing among his colleagues and smiling with complete delight and pride.
Thank you, Mr. President for a great leadership lesson in how kindness, curiosity, and a little humor can disarm someone’s fear and lead to a treasured moment.
