The technology described herein is directed towards determining a datacenter's power consumption of its devices at the workload level, from which an objective carbon footprint impact score can be determined. Devices can include servers, network devices such as switches, and storage devices. For a group of workloads at a location, workload power consumption values can be determined based on collected power-related workload metrics data. The power consumption values are used in determining per-workload carbon footprint values for the workloads based on the location. One or more actions can be taken to modify the respective carbon footprint values, e.g., moving a workload to a different location, changing device hardware, and so on.