Peter W. Sauer

Biography

Pete Sauer obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri at Rolla in 1969. From 1969 to 1973, he was the electrical engineer on a design assistance team in the Air Force for the Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Virginia, working on design and construction of airfield lighting and electrical distribution systems. He obtained the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1974 and 1977, respectively. He was been on the faculty at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign starting in 1977, where he taught courses and directs research on power systems and electric machines. His main contributions were in modeling and simulation of power system dynamics with applications to steady-state and transient stability analysis. He wrote more than 200 technical papers and the book with M. A. Pai, “Power System Dynamics and Stability,” published by Prentice Hall in 1998.

From August 1991 to August 1992, he served as the Program Director for Power Systems in the Electrical and Communication Systems Division of the National Science Foundation in Washington D.C. He is a cofounder of PowerWorld Corporation and served as Chairman of the Board of Directors from 1996-2001. He was a cofounder of the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC) and has served as the Illinois site director from 1996 to the present. He served in the Air Force Civil Engineering reserves at Chanute AFB, Illinois and Scott AFB, Illinois until his retirement as a Lt. Col. in 1998. He was the Grainger Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at Illinois. He was a registered Professional Engineer in Virginia and Illinois, a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Sauer died on December 27th, 2022.