Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf on Thursday invited the private sector and foreign investors to set up power plants in the country to help meet its energy requirements.

Pakistan was facing serious shortage in energy sector, and offered lucrative returns to investors as the power needs were going up at the rate of 10 percent per annum, said Musharraf at a power plant foundation-laying ceremony near southern city Karachi, quoted by state media.

Musharraf said Pakistani government was working on a short, medium and long-term strategy to meet power shortage and said he was looking for all sorts of sources for power generation including water, gas, coal, alternative and nuclear energy.

The government was removing all bottlenecks to facilitate investors in the power sector, and had created investor-friendly policies by implementing liberalization and deregulation, Associated Press of Pakistan quoted the president as saying.

According to Musharraf, Foreign Direct Investment in Pakistan had risen upto six billion U.S. dollars from 300 million dollars in 1999.

He added that there was a need to upgrade the country's electricity generation, transmission and distribution to meet future energy needs.

Pakistan's power shortage that has been estimated to remain in the range of 1,000-2,000 MW (megawatt) during the current year is likely to cross 3,000 MW next year and to increase to about 5,300 MW by 2010, according to an earlier report of DAWN newspaper.