It becomes even less clear if the stationary wheel is a disk wheel that may or may not have an internal pre-stress, and we have no way of telling. Once again it becomes essential to be very precise about the experiment, and exactly what question is being asked.
The question I think is fairly clear.
How is the electrical energy delivered from the source (say a battery or charged capacitor) to the lamp?To be even more clear a lamp is the same with a resistor or wire.
Derek take is that electrical energy travels from the battery trough that 1m air gap with his only proof being observing some small amount of current through the lamp in about the time it takes light to travel 1m.
He completely ignores the energy storage device formed by the transmission line.
Also is not about the distance from battery to lamp but about the distance from the switch.
Then there is absolutely no discussion about the steady state DC. At DC you do not even need to understand or acknowledge energy storage and you can not explain energy not traveling through wires.
In both cases DC and AC electric current travels through wires which means electrical power is dissipated in the wires and electrical power integrated over time is electrical energy.
Both the electric field (as found between the capacitor plates) and magnetic field around a stream of moving charged particles (what electric current is) are conservative fields meaning they do not radiate into space and you can not collect energy from that.
So is the same as magnetic field around a permanent magnet is always there and there is no way for you to extract any energy from that.
You can move the magnet or a wire around a magnet but that is converting mechanical energy into electrical energy not getting energy from the magnet.
The lumped element model perfectly describes what happens as seen by my spice simulation that got the same results Derek got in his real world experiment.