It’s time for NextEra Energy to get serious.

Gov. David Ige’s administration, for a second time, roundly rejected the Florida-based company’s efforts to sweeten the pot in its proposed purchase of Hawaiian Electric Industries.

The latest rejection, which included blunt warnings against “cagily worded” promises designed to “pull the wool over the other parties’ eyes,” showed a remarkable lack of trust in NextEra and Hawaiian Electric.

At this point, NextEra needs to return to the table with commitments that will satisfy the state’s concerns.

The state’s pushback is understandable, given that few of NextEra’s 85 commitments filed with the Public Utilities Commission, which include more than 50 new ones added in August, appear to offer real additional value. NextEra has been showing its hand a little at a time, but will soon need to place its best cards on the table. The proposed transaction is too important to the state to be approved on vague promises.

The state Office of Planning; the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism; and the state Consumer Advocate filed more than 480 pages Wednesday with the Public Utilities Commission. Their message was plain: NextEra’s revised commitments filed with the PUC on Aug. 31 fell short of expectations, and the sale is still not in the public interest.

Following the first round of rejections by Ige’s administration, NextEra provided additional details of its $4.3 billion purchase.

DBEDT found only five of the 85 commitments constitute meaningful efforts to provide benefits. And those five “do not provide benefits sufficient to meet the public interest standard,” according to DBEDT’s filing.

NextEra estimated in its revised proposal that it would deliver overall customer savings of nearly $465 million and economic benefits for the state of Hawaii of approximately $500 million in the first five years. The energy giant previously had estimated $60 million in consumer benefits over four years.

State Energy Administrator Mark Glick, in rebuttal testimony, said that despite relying upon the estimated $1 billion in purported benefits as a main selling point of the transaction, NextEra makes clear it is “only willing to commit to providing $60 million of that $1 billion.”

“Ultimately Customers and the State bear the risk if the $940 million in total estimated savings and economic benefits do not materialize,” Glick said.

Referencing a recent utility merger in Washington, D.C., Glick noted that in Excelon Corp.’s proposed acquisition of Pepco Holdings, Excelon initially committed to a $100 million Consumer Investment Fund. The fund, according to Glick, constituted an up-front commitment from shareholders to provide quantifiable benefits to customers in the event synergy savings did not materialize.

In other words, NextEra will have to commit real dollars, and lots of them, to back up its promises.

Among those promises is to give Hawaii’s heavily burdened ratepayers relief they can count on. The Consumer Advocate rightly recommended that NextEra offer a transparent plan by which estimated benefits will be “hard-wired” into a rate plan that will provide “measurable and substantial” benefits.

The Consumer Advocate also chided NextEra and HEI: “Applicants should also not offer further new or modified commitments that are cagily worded that may be perceived as an attempt to pull the wool over the other parties’ eyes. This will only lead to unproductive exchanges amongst the parties that will benefit no one.”

Read: Don’t waste our time.

The Office of Planning flat-out recommended that NextEra’s purchase of HEI be denied. But it’s not clear how that would improve the situation. The office gave as options a better-resourced PUC — which is needed anyway — or competition to buy HEI based on consumer, not shareholder, benefit. So far, there have been no other viable suitors for HEI, at least none that have come forward publicly.

NextEra should be a viable option. Its resources are vastly larger than HEI’s, and it is reasonable to believe NextEra could advance the state’s renewable energy goals while controlling customer bills faster and more efficiently than HEI alone. There just aren’t enough assurances that it will.

The PUC’s review of the proposed sale could possibly be finished by June, but PUC head Randy Iwase has said it could take longer than that given the gravity of commission’s decision.

It’s time for NextEra to determine how badly — and how quickly — it wants this deal to go through. If time is of the essence, NextEra must come up with firm, quantifiable commitments that will meet the needs of the state and HEI’s customers, not just its shareholders.