Motivated by the Dani-Mainkar construction, we extend the notion of independence polynomial of graphs to arbitrary 2-step nilpotent Lie algebras. After establishing efficiently computable upper and lower bounds for the independence number, we discuss a metric-dependent generalization motivated by a quantum mechanical interpretation of our construction. As an application, we derive elementary bounds for the dimension of abelian subalgebras of 2-step nilpotent Lie algebras.