You rightly pointed out the fact that Nicaragua being a poor country would have found it difficult to get financial help and i also admit that certain points may have been skipped but i think that various governments did little to stop the country from slipping into the grip of foreign oil. As the president of one of the power companies said, the government chose the cheapest and easiest way to address the energy needs of the country.

Daniel Ortega made the unfortunately worded statement that he wanted Nicaragua to become "the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy" at the same moment he was establishing all those ALBA oil/petrochemical exchanges and with Venezuela. Which he pretty much had to do, I think, as the country was close to being paralyzed by the price of oil disrupting transportation of goods and people.

This article doesn't take into account at all the priorities of shifting governments in Nicaragua (which were radically different under the dictatorship, the revolutionary government, the neoliberal government that followed, and the current… a new word will have to be invented for the neo-Sandinista administration) nor, when blaming the shortsightedness of government, does it take into account the pressures of the international financial sector which can really dictate priorities in a country as impoverished as Nicaragua. The priorities and conditions of the loans given to Nicaragua by the World Bank/BID/IMF/etc. were to privatize at all cost, and for the government to disinvest in infrastructure at all costs, so that it could be privatized. Result: the public electric co. in Nicaragua was given away to a Spanish company for a fraction of its value and they have done a wretched job of delivering power to Nicaraguans. Ortega, under the ALBA, got funding from Venezuela to build new power plants, and he pretty much had to accept that.