This thesis addresses research questions and implications in the context of the German and European energy transformation and is comprised of three parts: Part I starts with a chapter providing an introduction to the topic. Chapter 2 then focuses on the topic of "sector coupling" and the technical and economic challenges of coupling electricity, heat, and transportation, in order to further transform towards a system relying on renewables instead of fossil and fissil fuels as a primary source

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... energy. For Germany some practical quantitative scenarios for sector coupling until 2030 and 2050 are being discussed. Part II deals with economic dispatch modeling. In Chapter 3 a five-fold approach to open science is introduced and the advantages of open energy models are being discussed. A fully open-source bottom-up electricity sector model with high spatial resolution using the Julia programming environment is then developed describing source code and a data set for Germany. Following the open approach, the entire model code and used data set are publicly available and open-source solvers like ECOS and CLP are used. The model is then benchmarked regarding runtime of building and solving against a representation in GAMS as a commercial algebraic modeling language and against Gurobi, CPLEX, and Mosek as commercial solvers. Chapter 4 examines the ongoing discussion about potential effects of introducing bidding zones in Germany. An electricity sector model with network representation is applied to analyze the system implications and the distributional effects of two bidding zones in the German electricity system in 2012 and 2015. Results show a modest decrease in cross-zonal re-dispatch levels, particularly in 2015. However, overall network congestion and re-dispatch levels increase in 2015 and also remain on a high level in case of two bidding zones. Results are very sensitive to more than two bidding zones and additional line investments, illustrating the challenge to define stable price zones in a dynamic setting. Ch [...]