ArsTechnica has a good article on 5G speeds and a barrier during the summer. Summer barrier? It is hotter in many places of the world this summer and 5G is hotter than 4G LTE.

Bottom line:

"This persistent overheating behavior just makes me more confident in recommending that consumers wait to buy a 5G phone."
The devices are bigger, hotter, more expensive, and have less battery life than their 4G counterparts.

Any data center person knows when there are higher performing systems there is going to be a need for more cooling. Have not seen a new 5G phone cooling system yet, so that means the phone will just get hotter as a heat sink and when it gets too hot it needs to throttle back or turn off.

And at the 5G cellular tower you can imagine the power consumption and heat will increase as well. Can well imagine that 5G infrastructure could be a magnitude higher in power consumption if it was easy to add power and cooling, but it is not.

The overall power consumption of 5G could be significant enough to limit its growth and adoption.