After more than one and a half years as executive director of The Green Grid, Mark Monroe is back to the for-profit world, having landed a CTO and VP position at DLB Associates, a quiet giant in the data center engineering and design world.

Among New Jersey-based DLB’s cumulative 4GW of data center capacity deployed around the world are eight of the largest Google data center campuses.

The company’s president and founder is Don Beaty, who is also currently the international chair of Technical Committee 9.9 of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers. This is the committee that sets the agenda for highly influential data center design and operation guidelines, such as the operating temperature and humidity range for IT equipment.

“As DLB’s CTO & VP, Mark will continue and further DLB’s passion and diligence on right-sizing the level of technology understanding and application for our clients, ensuring that they are able to make well-informed decisions,” Beaty said, commenting on Monroe’s appointment.

DLB announced the appointment at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

Monroe has been in the IT industry for about 30 years, more than half of which he spent at Sun Microsystems, where he held a variety of positions, including director roles in IT operation, cloud computing, environmental responsibility and software development and quality.

During his tenure as its executive director, The Green Grid (TGG) broadened its scope from focusing purely on data center energy efficiency to looking more holistically at environmental sustainability of corporate IT.

The organization is famous for creating the most popular - albeit often misused by marketeers - data center energy efficiency metric: Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).

Most recent developments at TGG were the release of a report on implications of energy policy in Europe, Middle East and Africa on data center industry in those regions, and the merger with Climate Savers, a nonprofit focusing on reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with computer use by people and companies started about five years ago by Google and Intel.

TGG has also recently expanded into China, currently working to train local data center industry leaders there, Monroe said.